If you guys have noticed, i have been active on beta, alpha and more recently back on eta, theta and zeta. A New Community is being built for Alliances that share the members of my alliances. Currently ONLY the ZETA alliance will be in this alliance, however an extention on beta, and alpha are in the works. from that we should beable to gain some experience and active userbase in which we will be able to expand to theta, eta, and other notable servers. ALL former POG alliances are welcome to Join the New Community.

I am not sure what got me thinking of this, but it occurred to me that with the new changes to pillaging in 3.0, Vacation Mode may now be less important (if not obsolete), especially during short departures. If you were going to be away from the game for a long weekend, for example, here is a strategy you could try.

This strategy assumes you are an established player with a sufficiently scary generals score and a formidable spy defense in every town. This way, nobody can spy on you and determine which towns are undefended.

Since your gold can no longer be pillaged, it's possible to cut production of all resources in a given town and make nothing but gold without fear of losing that gold to a raid.

In your wine towns, you would cut wine production to match as closely as possible the consumption of wine by the tavern in that town. Cut all other resource production to zero. Your goal is to have nothing lootable at all in the wine towns.

You must designate a single town as your safe zone. Move ALL troops, ships, and surplus goods from other towns into this town. The safe zone must have high level spies and walls, and be very well defended. This town also needs to have a large stockpile of wine. I suggest you choose a non-wine town for this, since during your vacation you cannot micromanage wine shipments to this town. You can keep production going in this town since it is not likely to fall in the event of an attack.

In other non-wine towns that are not safe zones, there is a bit of a dilemma. Depending on the town size, you could cut tavern consumption somewhat to hedge against loss of wine reserves during an attack. Your goal is to try to keep only a minimal amount of wine here, knowing that if this town is attacked during your absence, the remaining amount in the town will most likely fall to the safe amount in your warehouse. This amount for warehouse level 18 is 1490 wine, which would last for around half a day, depending on your tavern size and wine press level. This is the biggest gamble in this vacation strategy. You might want to keep a few troops and ships on reserve in these towns to discourage any exploratory attacks. Otherwise, move all goods and troops/ships away from these towns into your safe zone.

In any event, the best-case scenario is that you are not attacked at all during the absence, and your towns have generated a nice stockpile of gold to spend when you get back. The next-to-best-case-scenario is that if you did come under attack, the attacks landed only on one of your undefended wine towns, which would lose no goods at all (since they are producing only gold and a trivial amount of subsistence wine). Another less desirable (but not devastating) scenario would be an attack on your safe zone which (hopefully) resulted in a defeat to the attacker.

The almost-worst-case scenario here is an attack on a non-wine, non-safe zone town which depletes the reserve wine stash enough that the town eventually runs out of wine due to tavern usage, leading to unhappiness and falling population.

The worst-case scenario, of course, is an attack on your safe zone which results in complete annihilation of your combined military forces, loss of goods, unhappiness in that town, etc.

I wouldn't recommend trying to pull off this strategy if you plan to be gone more than 1 or 2 days, but for a short absence it might be worth the risk, especially if you have no enemies at the time of your departure.

This strategy would also work during war. Soon you will see most people implementing this and wars will get considerably harder and probably pointless as goods and units can be easily moved around without fear of loosing them.